Gary Gygax, creator (with Dave Arneson) of the immensely successful Dungeons & Dragons series of role playing games has died at the age of 69. Gygax, who had been suffering from health problems recently, is survived by his widow, six children and five grandchildren.

Dungeons & Dragons seized the imagination of millions of white teenage males in the 1970s and 1980s, who embraced the game's ancient Europen archetypes and lore in unconscious reaction to the antiwhite cultural collapse and social decline represented by the 1960s.

D&D players assume the persona of characters drawn from ancient European legend, and games involve various adventures. In millions of basements and rec rooms across America, white teens switched off the television to become knights errant and warlocks, immersing themselves in their European past. (Those tempted to smile should consider the "hip hop" culture aimed at our youth today).

Gygax will be remembered by prowhite cultural historians as one of the most important figures in a renaissance of European American self awareness which started in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, and which continues on to this day.

D&D eventually spun off a whole game series and drew a number of imitations. These role playing games became the target of sensationalist Christian Right figures, who saw a danger of the games reviving an interest in heathenism among white youth. In fact, many people now involved in the pagan movement are veterans of the "D&D phenomenon," while role playing games also had a hand in sparking the "black metal" and "neofolk" underground music scenes, especially in northern Europe. Heavy metal itself gained prominence largely as a result of the cultural milieu spearheaded by the likes of Gary Gygax.

A son of a Swiss immigrant, Gygax was a fan of war games, and had played chess since the age of five. As a child he discovered the fantasy fiction genre, which builds on European folklore and history. Among his favorite authors was the racialist Texan Robert E. Howard, who is best known for Conan the Barbarian.

The 1974 launch of Dungeons & Dragons capitalized on the enormous popularity of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, which were filling a cultural void created by "The Sixties." The middle of the 1970s saw a renewed interest in European American traditional cultural values, part of a current that also, coincidentally, built the Christian Right and put Ronald Reagan in the White House.

The "mainstream" media fuels a perception of D&D fans as "nerds," much as they disparage Evel Knievel and the end stage Elvis Presley as icons of the hated "rednecks" and "white trash." And while there may be some truth to these perceptions, the fact is that all of these cultural phenomena tapped into an underground stream of white consciousness in a key period, the middle of the 1970s, and were embraced by segments of the demographic fatigued by the "civil rights" era, the values meltdown of the 1960s, the Nixon and Vietnam fiascoes and the Ford/Carter malais. Many of the white boys who got into D&D were part of the first latchkey kid generation, children of broken homes and victims of Baby Boom selfishness.

The cultural impact of Gary Gygax was phenomenal. Aside from the games, films were inspired by his work, along with books, while the first person action video games of today owe a lot to the pioneering work of D&D. A glance at any shelf in a video game store shows the huge influence of Gygax. Fantasy based on European history and lore became "cool" again; while today white kids are acclimated to revere black ghetto rap thugs as barometers of hipness, youth in the 80s listened to heavy metal, with its lyrical swords and sorcery. While rap and metal both are cheesy, metal at least had a somewhat positive European outlook. Gary Gygax was a part of this general cultural movement towards our roots.

Most importantly, by tapping into a need at a point of cultural crisis, Gygax pioneered the popularity, and saleability, of entertainment based on European history and tradition.

Today, with whites facing a Third World immigration invasion, the continuing collapse of Western values, and uncertainty about the future, a market thrives for such things as the recent, hugely successful Lord of the Rings films, along with Narnia, Beowulf, 300, The Da Vinci Code and other projects. The fact that some of these projects have a neutral or even blatantly antiwhite message does not change the fact that the Powers that Be recognize a demand and seek to fill it. Gary Gygax pioneered a formula for meeting such a demand, and for that he will continue to be remembered.

D&D also helped to wean a generation of youth saturated in media off of pop culture, allowing them to think for themselves and grow their own imaginations. Like a latter day reincarnation of the Druidic bardic tradition, the D&D phenomenon was a catalyst for creativity that would have been lost forever if D&D, and the cultural renewal it represented, had never existed.

Like many such geniuses, Gary Gygax had no idea about the cultural significance of his vision. He was simply a businessman and a fan, doing what he loved best. It is nice to think that if Gary Gygax had never lived something similar would have come along, and probably it would have. But all the same, Gary Gygax will go down in history as a very important figure in the renaissance of our people.